Edited: I actually had to scroll through my mailbox to help my overtaxed memory, but thanks to the following who were my betas/collaborators: gattagrigia (for crucial help on reshaping the song into a more narrative structure), laurashapiro (color, color and more color!), and permetaform (beats are our friends). And a special thanks to xlorp for patiently walking into the room every 15 minutes when I called out: "oooh, look at this clip. And this clip. And this clip....Oh look! Another clip."

Some random technical comments. I’ve never offered any comments before on a vid. It seems time consuming, somewhat self-reflective, and boring. But never let it be said, I was afraid to be boring. Or self-absorbed. On Song Structure"Ghost" by Live is a 5min song, with several repeated choruses and stanzas. I knew I needed to cut it. After my first cut, I contacted gattagrigia (a fellow vidder and Dr Who fan) and asked her what else needed to be cut. She suggested we take out all the choruses except the last one. I also trimmed the beginning and snipped off the instrumental bridges and the end. Don’t be surprised if you don’t recognize the song – after editing, it comes in around 2 min 53 sec. But it makes a stronger narrative. Go betas! (or collaborators – I just cannot think of people as fish. They are more like partners in crime – oops, vidding).

On POVThe vid starts off in the Doctor’s POV. In the last stanza, I shifted the POV to Rose - now the Doctor is her "ghost." POV's shifts are tricky - particularly when you don’t evenly divide the song into sections. Here, I reserved only the last stanza for Rose - matching the female singer's voice with Rose's POV. I hinted at Rose's presence (as a possible POV character) earlier when I used a matte frame image of the Doctor & Rose holding hands and superimposed it over a long shot of the Dr, Rose and the Tardis. This is the first time in the song that the female singer's voice bleeds through clearly and I wanted to make her presence known.

On Color A few people commented on the color of the clips. I used the same source as the rest of the world - the wonderful avi files from bittorent. I did do some color correcting - the most dramatic changes are the clips using the Daleks, where I applied what I call the "copper" filter - it turns metal more bronzy and adds a greenish undertone. This was to match the show's use of green for the Dalek's weapons. I also (with Laura’s help) used the color corrector to change a ceiling panel and its lighting to blue to match the surrounding clips. I washed out a few clips & added a "glow" filter to soften one of the Rose clips. And that was pretty much it (besides the normal lightening/darkening I do for every vid).

I was fortunate that the clips I selected carried their own built-in color scheme - blue and gold. And once I picked up on this, it helped me in the final selection of clips.

Clip ChoiceNot much to add there, except the scenes with the Doctor running down a burning hallway are from a BBC trailer. Unfortunately, the BBC logo is a huge boomingly loud red thing, so I needed to do a lot of matting, shifting, zooming etc. I was not completely successful in eliminating the logo - but in the end, allowed the 80/20 rule to kick in. I could not physically afford to spend another 3 days trying to remove a smallish 2x2 area. Bad BBC.

Aspect Ratio Woes.I listened to fans moaning about aspect ratio issues and thought – oh that will never impact me. Ha ha. You can hear the universe laughing behind my back. Since my external capture card no longer imports, I was stuck with DVD ripping. I had almost completed the vid, before I discovered that my aspect ratio adjustments were still off (even using the ones recommended by other editors.) I resorted to the low tech method - placing post-its on the screen to mark the 4 corners I wanted. And adjusted the ratios step by step. And they match nothing known to man. More evidence that the BBC is not of this earth.